Wednesday, 17 February 2010

For starters, I my congratulations to Scatts and Island1 who run Polandian, a humorous English-language website about Poland, which is today celebrating its second anniversary. Keep it up guys and beware. I’m working on tweaking the rules of mathematics so that my blog will be in a few years older than yours ;)

Before it happens I would like to thank all visitors who have been popping in here, mostly to the ones who left their marks by commenting on my posts.

I recently installed a visit counter on the sidebar so you can keep track of daily number of visits, but to lace this post with some statistics, I looked around the search engine queries which diverted some accidental users here.

Besides, there were plenty of usual English-language queries (why are the Polish so funny?) and lots of ones showing attempts to find translations of some difficult Polish words or idioms.

A success – it was a year of regular and relatively readable blogging. I did what I intended to do – I have shared my ideas with the world, in a foreign language to make it more challenging and pleasurable.

A failure – as I set up this blog exactly a year ago it was aimed mostly at fellow students from my university. Note that the domain “student-sgh” is Polish. I realise some topics are quite difficult, though I’m trying my best to lay everything out in a possibly plain way.

I recognise a problem of language barrier in Poland. Reading a feature in a foreign language requires more effort than in Polish, particularly when a topic isn’t simple. And even if they read it, having to comment on the post in English works as a deterrent. Expressing complex ideas and argumentations in a foreign language is not easy, but hey, practice makes perfect!

Followers

A review

Written by a more-or-less anonymous Polish student, PES can be a daunting read for the generally attention-deficient blog reader, but it’s worth the effort. The bloke refuses to compromise and will hit you with 2,000 words about Polish corruption if he feels it’s needed. The fact that he makes the effort to do all this in English leaves me in awe.